This Team Is Gonna Break Road Racing (Thank God!)

From their skinsuits to their street edge, L.A.-based CNCPT is challenging cycling's norms

By
James Stout

Aug 29, 2018

“We don’t like losing.”

The break is not getting caught. When the five of them get to the finish, the sprint will most likely go to 29-year-old Justin Williams—a muscular, multiple-time national criterium and track champion. The other riders in the break know this. They’re planning on keying off Justin when the sprint starts.

So Justin does what nobody expects: He attacks. He surprises even his friend and teammate in the breakaway, 22-year-old Dante Young. While Dante drips with talent, he lacks the experience of the riders around him, so when the break chases and then catches Justin, he’s unsure how to respond. The bell rings, signaling the final lap. The riders all look at each other and gulp air, and as they do, a single rider goes off the front. Dante knows enough to go with the rider, to cover the move, but as he does, he looks back for Justin. And in that split-second of hesitation, the attacking rider, Imeh Nsek, gets clear.

Dante gets caught by the break. Imeh stays away and wins. Justin, spent and frustrated, holds off the field for eighth.

I make my way back to the car from turn four, where I’d been watching. Usually, Justin’s face breaks into his trademark huge smile when he sees someone he recognizes, but he’s scowling now. I let him ride around a bit, catch his breath, and it is not until he is sitting under a tree, skinsuit pulled down to the waist, that I ask how he feels.

“We don’t like losing,” he says.

“We're all brothers, we all split even.”

“When you join a cycling team, you’re supposed to be a robot,” says Cory Williams, 25, one of Justin's two brothers who were also in the race today. “I mean hell, man, they all dress the same way, eat the same food, they’ve got the same haircut.”

The CNCPT team (pronounced “concept”) wants to do things differently. With a roster comprised entirely of young men of color, and a sophisticated branding and social media strategy, the Los Angeles development team aims to represent what it terms the city’s “true urban and street edge,” and to broaden the appeal of their sport to a more diverse audience—one that may not have considered road cycling in the past.

At the heart are the Williams brothers: big brother Justin, who founded the team; veteran racer and new father CJ, 27; and Cory. (Justin technically races independently, and Cory for the pro team Elevate KHS, but both mentor the CNCPT riders, and the group works together as a team in races.) The rest of the roster: Tim McGee, 27, who grew up in Hawaii; Boston native “Big Mike” Szerszunowicz, 35, the newest member of the team; Dante, who is the youngest; photographer Alonso Tal, 30, who goes by Zo; and Alvin Escajeda, 26, and Angel Munoz, 23, who came to the team from the urban fixed-gear scene.

These guys want to change cycling, but first they want dinner. We head to Chipotle. CJ is the last to get there, and the others are already queued up, so he stands alone at the back of the long line. With braided hair past his shoulders, a stocky build, thick beard, and piercing stare, CJ can be intimidating. As Dante describes it, “When I see someone pushing CJ [around], I go the other way, because it isn’t gonna end well [for the other guy].” But, here at Chipotle, the same guy who will throw elbows at 30mph doesn’t want to be rude and cut the line.

When the group gets to the counter, Cory looks back at CJ and says, “I’ll order for him, I know what my brother gets.”

They’re barely covering the cost of their food with their winnings, which include Dante’s fifth-place payout and a $50 prime CJ won. But there is none of the bickering about the division of prize money that is so common on teams. “We’re all brothers, we all split even,” Justin says. Everybody nods.

From left: Dante, Mike, and Alvin riding in Palm Springs, California, last year.

Cesar Alvarez

“I’ll just do it myself.”

The Williams family is Belizean-American, and father Calman Williams was an accomplished bike racer. In Belize, the biggest event of the year is the Holy Saturday Cross-Country Classic. Justin, Cory, and CJ grew up on the legend of this race and their father’s fifth place there.

The Williams brothers started racing when Justin was 14, under the direction of their father as well as racing legends like Rahsaan Bahati, an African-American criterium racer who won high-level races on big teams such as Saturn and Rock Racing. Justin won four national titles as a junior and U23 racer, and an elite national track championship in 2009.

But once CJ and Cory outgrew U23 racing, they started to get frustrated with the amateur road racing teams they joined, where they could find no bond between the riders that approached how they’d all felt as a racing family.

Justin, who as a junior raced on Rock Racing as well as Trek-Livestrong’s U23 squad, remembers going to watch CJ and Tim at a local amateur race and seeing their teammates attack each other, focused more on individual results than on helping the squad win in whatever way that could best happen. He says he grew tired of seeing talent wasted like that. He was also tired of the lack of diversity in road racing, which—at best—reinforced notions about how racers looked and who they were. He recalls arriving at a host house in Alabama once, where he walked into his assigned bedroom and found the walls covered in Confederate flags. “You can only imagine how uncomfortable it was for me,” he says.

He knew there was a diverse group of promising young riders out there, especially in the fixie scene, who were turned off by the style and attitude of the local road racing scene. Justin believed these black and Hispanic riders—riders like his younger brothers—were often overlooked, and that if they just had access to support and mentoring, more of them could be dominant on the road.

Eventually, Justin thought, “Fuck this shit, I’ll just do it myself.”

Angel at San Francisco’s Mission Crit, a fixed-gear race, in April 2018.

Cesar Alvarez

“I still have a hard time relating to a lot of the guys that race.”

Bobby Endo got into cycling in 2007, when he started creating the team kits for Rock Racing—that squad that was sponsored by the company where he worked as a designer, Rock & Republic jeans, and which quickly became known for its loud kits, and edgy and urban aesthetic (and lax attitude toward hiring ex-dopers).

It was a high-profile gig, but he says he felt like an outsider (“I still have a hard time relating to a lot of the guys that race”) until a coworker got him on a bike and he fell in love with the sensation of speed, the way the bike could be an avenue for self-expression.

His initial aversion to personally wearing “tights” overcome, he started looking for riding clothes that fit his sense of style as well as his standard of quality, and came up disappointed. So he founded his own cycling clothing company, Endo Customs, and collaborated with influential Southern California brands like Tracko and Team Dream to make their kits. Bobby’s designs take the clean aesthetic that has become en vogue in road cycling in the past five years, and gives it more street swagger with bold colors and patterns. “I want to get somebody like myself to take a second look at the sport,” he says.

Bobby and Justin had met earlier, but reconnected in 2010 through Rahsaan Bahati. They started hanging out, talking about bikes, art, fashion, design, and, eventually, a team. In late 2014, Justin met fixed-gear-turned-road-racer Alonso Tal. Zo, a photographer who did marketing work for sports and urban lifestyle brands, had also been struggling to find a team with guys he’d want to hang with outside of racing.

With Bobby’s creative flair, Justin’s racing experience, and Zo’s storytelling abilities, they had the key ingredients by 2015. Bobby would fund the squad. The Williams brothers would come along as a package deal. They just needed to find a few other talented riders.

The team in July 2018

Cesar Alvarez

“There’s three black guys doing these crazy crits. Maybe I could be number four.”

Dante Young grew up skateboarding. He looked up to black skaters like Stevie Williams and Nyjah Houston. But the cost of the boards he broke added up. This led him to basketball, until a knee injury took him off the court at 16. At that point, he got a vintage road bike from a neighbor. It was a 62cm frame, way too big, but he rode it everywhere. Eventually he saved $200 for a pink and silver fixie and started riding it from his home in the San Fernando Valley to Venice Beach. On one of these rides, he met Angel Munoz, and the two started riding together regularly.

Dante watched a lot of YouTube. Mostly, he says, he was “watching cats eat peanut butter,” but one day, he ran across a video of a track race. He was captivated. Turned out, there was a velodrome 10 miles away. When he showed up to try racing there, he remembers, “I was getting dropped or coming in last.” But he kept going back. He was at the track so much that his sister considered stepping in to keep his focus on his education. Dante grew up in North Hills, in the Valley. There were gangs in his neighborhood. He had seen drive-by shootings. “Every night there were helicopters looking for people,” he says. Eventually, his sister relaxed. She thought, “He isn’t in a gang or selling drugs or shooting anyone. He’s just riding his bicycle.”

Dante earned a sponsorship racing fixed-gear crits like Red Hook, and built up a following. “Hispanic kids, black kids, minorities in general were super-excited that there was this kid who grew up where they grew up,” he says.

One day, Dante’s YouTube habit led him to Justin and Cory’s GoPro race videos. He was shocked: “There’s three black guys doing these crazy crits.” He thought, “Maybe I could be number four.”

Soon, he was training on the road and going to group rides. At the start of one of the big weekend rides, Dante recognized Justin and pulled up next to him, nervous to meet his hero. But Justin was talking to someone else. The group set off, and Dante got dropped. “But I went back to that ride every single Saturday,” he says, “just trying to see him again.”

Their next encounter was at a track clinic that the Williams brothers put on. Dante won the novice scratch race, and Cory gave him a pair of socks. Dante put them on right there. Then Justin, half-jokingly, asked if anyone wanted to race. Dante raised his hand immediately. He says now, “I just wanted to make an impression so they would remember me.”

When they lined up for the match sprint, Justin let Dante ride the front for most of the two laps. He could tell Dante had talent, and even considered letting him win. But then he remembered letting Tim McGee win a race once, and never hearing the end of it. He let Dante stay in front until victory seemed certain to the kid, then he pounced, and, as Dante says, “He came around me so fast!”

But when Justin, Bobby, and Zo began planning the team in the summer of 2015, they reached out to Dante. Dante asked if his buddy Angel could be on the team too. Justin agreed to let Angel tag along on some rides, but said there wasn’t space on the team for another rider. Then, on one of the team’s first winter group rides, Pro Tour racer Taylor Phinney, a friend of Justin’s, came along and blew the group apart. “He even dropped me,” Justin says.

But Angel hung on.

“I figured I could make some more room,” Justin says.

In his first season of racing with the team, Dante was very green, and his strategy initially consisted of simply marking one or two riders, letting them dictate how he raced. But under the tutelage of the Williams brothers, he learned to take control of his racing. Even when he won, Justin told him what he could do better. In just under two years, Dante upgraded from a Category 5 beginner to a Cat 2, allowing him to join the Williams brothers in the elite races.

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Cesar Alvarez

“It all started with the money kit. I wore that everywhere until it faded and the bills were yellow.”

The CNCPT team debuted its first skinsuit on Valentine’s Day of 2016, at a race in La Brea, California. The suit was printed from edge to edge with $100 bills. Soon after, when they raced the Red Hook Crit in New York, they wore skinsuits based on the psychedelic patterns and bright colors of the Coogi sweater made famous by rapper Biggie Smalls. “Everyone in New York just went crazy,” Dante says.

The team raced Tulsa Tough in gray, black, and white “oil spill” kits that paid homage to the town’s history. They made tie-dye jerseys in collaboration with Team Dream. They made a skinsuit that looked like a Dodgers jersey, and for the photo shoot, Dante wore it to a game. Each race was a project: Bobby would design a kit, Zo would take photos and share them on social media.

Key to the look of the kits was that they weren’t plastered with logos. Aside from Endo, they started the team with no sponsors to represent. “We wanted to ride what we want,” Justin says. “But also we wanted to build our own brand. We wanted to build something so that when we called companies, they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ve been waiting for this opportunity.’”

Kit genius Bobby Endo in repose.

Cesar Alvarez

Today, CNCPT’s sponsors include Cannondale and Giro as well as Endo, but the kits are still clean-looking, and the team retains its distinct identity. Cannondale marketing director James Lalonde, who lives in New York, met the team on a visit to L.A. in CNCPT’s first year, when Endo was the only sponsor. “Bobby suggested I ride with them,” Lalonde recalls. “I went there the next morning, and every single rider on the team showed up, and they were in team kit.” On the 30- to 40-mile ride, Lalonde was impressed by the group’s tight bond, and pushed to make a sponsorship happen upon returning to the East Coast. “They’re bringing people into this family, and Bobby puts a lot of his own money into it and just has so much passion for it,” he says. “That’s just a really hard thing to turn your back on.”

For Dante, riding a bike from a major sponsor like Cannondale is a big confidence boost. But he still remembers that first skinsuit. “It all started with the money kit. I wore that everywhere until it faded and the bills were yellow.”

Dante encourages Alvin on Crybaby Hill at Tulsa Tough

Cesar Alvarez

“You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.”

Over dinner at Chipotle, we talk about the price of Campagnolo parts, and Justin jokes, “Italians don’t like us anyway. You shouldn’t ride Campy!” The comment makes the group crack up, but it has layers of real meaning. Road racing isn’t a place that traditionally embraces young black men. There’s outright racism, as we’ve seen with incidents such as the Tour de Romandie, where Team Sky’s Italian rider Gianni Moscon hurled slurs at another rider. But there’s also a crushing homogeneity that can at times create a less-than-welcoming atmosphere for anyone who’s different.

There are some cultural differences. Some of these guys are from parts of L.A.—the Williams brothers grew up in South Central—that may seem foreign to a lot of the cyclists they race with. For a while, they had a teammate who was white, and older. But he quit. “He didn’t like being the odd one out,” says Justin. “I was like, welcome to my life!”

“We knew it wasn’t gonna work out when we heard a firework and all ducked,” CJ adds. “We were like; ‘Hey dude, don’t you wanna survive? Get behind this car!’”

There were other, less comic, moments, like how some people talked about the money kits. They said they were tacky, made comments about the lack of 20s or 5s, and joked about the $100 bills when the guys won $20 primes. Some people even said it was “disrespectful”—a word that probably wouldn’t have been used if a white team had made the suits. Appropriating hip-hop culture is a socially acceptable way to be ironic and funny if you’re white. But when CNCPT owned their street edge, a lot of people didn’t like it.

One big LA club took a particular disliking to the team. What began as jabs about the kits and the team’s lack of a bike sponsor progressed to riders bumping Angel and Alvin off wheels and out of corners in races. Eventually this aggressive riding caused a crash. After Justin confronted the other team about it, Dante recalls, the rival group changed its Instagram bio: “It was like, ‘We’re not a concept, we’re a team.’” The implication was clear: These kids don’t belong. But Justin doesn’t want to harp on this incident. He brings the story to a swift conclusion: The other team’s vice president called him. Over the phone, Justin explained that he didn’t want trouble, but that his riders needed respect. “We all sat down, and we said we’re not gonna be dragged down into this, we’re gonna rise above it,” he says.

Still, every now and then, bigger and more established teams try to push them around in races or hassle them if they’re on the front. But this is nothing the team can’t handle. The Williams brothers grew up banging handlebars. Just riding along, Justin and Cory often bump into each other. “That’s so you’re not scared,” explains Dante, “so when someone bumps you in a race it’s nothing new.”

If you scroll down far enough in the comments on Cory’s videos, there’s some talk about the way the guys ride being dangerous. One racer I interviewed, who asked to remain anonymous, described their riding style as “aggressive,” and thought it set a “bad example.” Certainly, the Williams brothers don’t avoid physical contact, but I haven’t seen anything they’ve done that isn’t common in high-level criteriums, and racing in Southern California is generally known to be scrappier. I also spoke to several other elite racers who share my opinion that the Williams brothers are safe, and that some of these critiques may be rooted in an unconscious bias—it’s far too easy to call young black men aggressive. People have celebrated racers like like Marcel Kittel or Mark Cavendish for doing far worse.

CJ simply believes that “People don’t like us because we have this family vibe.” Justin’s attitude toward it may be summed up by the quote that he used as his Instagram bio for a while (it’s now been changed): “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.”

Cesar Alvarez

4 Facts About CNCPT’s Custom Cannondale CAAD12

1. Cannondale marketing director James Lalonde selected the brand’s aluminum race frame for the team because they specialize in criteriums. “Its just one of those bikes where if you do happen to put it down in a corner, which you’re more likely to do in a crit because you’re racing closer together, its more likely that you can pick it up and ride it again the next day,” he says.

2. The paint scheme was a collaboration between Bobby Endo and Cannondale designer Ryan Chung. The pebble graphic is a nod to the Nike Air Safari sneaker. The muted black and gray paint is inspired by the “murdered-out” Mercedes and Land Rovers on Bobby’s mood boards, says Chung. The subtle green accents are a Cannondale touch.

3. There’s an Easter egg on the bike: On the seat tube, where it meets the seatstays, are the words “Wam” and “Gone.” The guys joked that when they passed other racers, that’d be the last thing they’d see.

4. You can buy it in this "Team CNCPT" paint scheme. The bike is $3,500 and comes stock with a Shimano Ultegra/Dura-Ace drivetrain and a Power2Max power meter.

“I saw this thing that Rahsaan posted on Instagram and it was like me, and Cory, Rahsaan, and Charon [Smith], and it said #wakandaforever. I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! We can do that!’”

The next day’s race is held in Dominguez Hills, just outside of Compton. At stake isthe series leader’s jersey for the season. Cory is in second place with a shot at the win. He needs to win an intermediate sprint and finish the race ahead of his rival.

Dante is determined to work hard to secure a victory for the team today. Early in the race, he makes a split with Cory. It’s a big group, maybe a dozen riders. Dante looks around. He thinks, I’m in a breakaway with breakaway artists. He doesn’t know if he can finish with the group. But he steels himself to try: A moment of pain, a lifetime of glory, he says to himself.

Leading up to the intermediate sprint, Dante gets on the front and picks up the pace to string out the group and protect Cory from attacks. Cory wins the sprint. But he still needs to secure the race. Then, with just over five laps to go, Justin manages to escape from the pack that’s trailing the breakaway and come across. It’s perfect. Dante looks over at Justin, then he looks at Cory. Now we just have to make sure he wins.

With a lap to go, Dante hits the front again. He has a little juice left. His legs are burning. He digs as deep as he can. He picks up speed on the back straight—his GPS computer reads 31, 32, 33mph. He knows Justin and Cory are behind him. When they hit the last corner he peels off to let Justin do the rest. The pack thunders past. Dante looks up and he sees Cory’s hands go up in the air.

Dante did his job. He delivered.

Later, he tells me, he rode along thinking, Damn, you just led out Cory Williams! By the middle of the next week, Cory posts the video on YouTube, and Dante posts it on his Instagram. Justin comments, “You did good, son.” Maybe, Dante thinks, in someplace like Watts or South Central, some kid is watching all this and thinking it’d be pretty cool to be a bike racer.

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